ISLAMABAD/WASHINGTON, 19 January 2008 — Al-Qaeda and allies of Pakistani tribal leader Baitullah Mehsud were behind the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the US intelligence chief was quoted as saying yesterday.
A newly active alliance between local and international terrorists poses a grave risk to Pakistan’s government, CIA Director Michael Hayden told The Washington Post in an interview.
“What you see is, I think, a change in the character of what’s going on there,” Hayden said. “You’ve got this nexus now that probably was always there in latency but is now active: A nexus between Al-Qaeda and various extremist and separatist groups,” he was quoted as saying. “It is clear that their intention is to continue to try to do harm to the Pakistani state as it currently exists.”
Hayden’s comments provide “the most definitive public assessment by a US intelligence official” of Benazir’s assassination to date, according to the Post. “This was done by that network around Baitullah Mehsud. We have no reason to question that,” Hayden said, echoing assertions by President Pervez Musharraf’s government about Benazir’s death.
The CIA chief called the killing “part of an organized campaign” of attacks on Pakistani leaders. “Washington has not had a better partner in the war on terrorism than the Pakistanis,” and events of the past few weeks have deepened those ties, Hayden said.
There has been no recent increase in CIA engagement in the region, despite nervousness over the increasing instability of the nuclear-armed state, Hayden said. “The Afghan-Pakistan border region has been an area of focus for this agency since about 11 o’clock in the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and I really mean this,” Hayden was quoted as saying.
“We haven’t done a whole lot of retooling there in the last one week, one month, three months, six months and so on. This has been up there among our very highest priorities.”
US officials have held a series of meetings to discuss what to do if Pakistan’s crisis deepens, including possible covert action, the Post said.
In the days following the assassination, a spokesman for Mehsud, Maulana Muhammad Umar, had vehemently denied that Mehsud was involved in the attack. “We strongly deny it. Mehsud is not involved in the killing of Benazir,” he was quoted as saying in a telephone call to the Associated Press on Dec. 29.
— Additional input from AFP
